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Veritas blooms during expansion

Tags:
Gary Bloom,
Veritas,
Interview

Ian Fried, CNET CNET News

Published: 12 May 2003 16:13 BST

Following a string of acquisitions and new products, Bloom is in the midst of retooling the backup and recovery software maker into a supplier of technology for corporate data centres.

In part, Bloom's expansion plans are made necessary by the fact that the company's core business is levelling off. What's more, Veritas, which grew to prominence by helping companies manage their storage systems, faces increasing competition from hardware makers like EMC that are expanding into the software market.

So, where does that leave Veritas?

In a good spot, according to Bloom, who has major ambitions to cash in on the growing popularity of so-called utility computing. He sat down with CNET News.com, prior to last week's Veritas Vision conference in Las Vegas, to discuss his plans.

ZDNet: Hewlett-Packard, IBM and EMC all tie their growth in storage to their ability to execute in software. What does the growing importance of software to storage hardware makers suggest?

Bloom: Clearly, hardware is commoditising. We've watched the price per megabyte go from 15 cents to 20 cents per megabyte two and a half years ago to what the industry analysts now say is 4 cents a megabyte. The question is: If the profitability curve falls out of the bottom of your hardware business, what's the next logical step? The answer: software.

EMC has gone down the path of saying that it would compete with Veritas and try to become a storage software company. I have my share of scepticism about its ability to do that. We don't ignore EMC. However, we have seen other vendors turn to much more cooperative partnerships (like ones with us), even though they want to provide solutions in some portions of the storage software space. For instance, we've watched our relationship with HP and IBM actually grow. It's kind of a mixed bag.

Will emerging standards for storage software mean that there really is software that can interoperate at a deep level with all of the hardware out there?
I see most of the standards at a very basic level allowing different hardware makers to interoperate. It's not going to go terribly deep. Standards are good. Most of the interoperability today is not being provided by the standards. It's being provided by these kind of one-off, for lack of a better term, almost hostage exchange-type API (application program interface) exchanges: If you give me your API, I'll give you mine.

Do you expect these API swaps to go away?
No. I think you are going to see them happen more and more and more. It's a little bit of a catch-up mechanism to try to get interoperability, but it still leaves you in a pretty limited environment. We have a very broad architecture that allows interoperability of virtually any kind of device...That's a pretty slow path to catch up to what we've been doing.

Historically, most of your business has been in backup and recovery areas. Has Veritas been trying to grow into broader parts of the storage business?
Not really. Historically, backup was a big piece. What we've tried to do is move away from the core of providing the components that deliver storage and information, and to move into the automation of storage.

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